"Edgar Pangborn - A Master of Babylon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pangborn Edgar)

that sonata in the company of works that were older but no greater, and to play it—well, beyond his
best, so that even music critics would begin to see its importance in history.
He had never done it, had never felt the necessary assurance that he had entered into the sonata and
learned the depth of it. Now, when there was none to hear or care, unless the harmless brown spiders in
the corners of the auditorium had a taste for music, there was still the Project. I hear, Brian thought. I
care, and with myself for audience I wish to hear it once as it ought to be, a final statement for a world
that was (I think) too good to die.
Technically, of course, he had it. The athletic de-mands Carr made on the performer were
tremendous, but, given technique, there was nothing impossible about them. Anyone capable of concert
work could at least play the notes at the required tempi. And any reasonably shrewd pianist could keep
track of the dynamics, saving strength for the shattering finale. Brian had heard the sonata played by
others two or three times in the old days—competently. Competency was not enough.
For example, what about the third movement, the mad scherzo, and the five tiny interludes of quiet
scat-tered through its plunging fury? They were not alike. Related, but each one demanded a new climate
of heart and mind—tenderness, regret, simple relaxation. Flowers on a flood—no. Window lights in a
storm—no. The innocence of a child in a bombed city—no, not really. Something of all those. Much
more, too, defying words.
What of the second movement, the largo, where in a way the pattern was reversed, the midnight
intro-spection interrupted by moments of anger, or longing, or despair like the despair of an angel beating
his wings against a prison of glass?
It was a work in which something of Carr's life, Carr's temperament, had to come into you, whether
you dared welcome it or not; otherwise your playing was no more than reproduction of notes on a page.
Can's life was not for the contemplation of the timid.
The details were superficially well-known; the biog-raphies were like musical notation, meaningless
with-out interpretation and insight. Carr was a drunken roarer, a young devil-god with such a consuming
hun-ger for life that he choked to death on it. His friends hated him for the way he drained their lives,
loving them to distraction and the next moment having no time for them because he loved his work more.
His enemies must have had times of helplessly admiring him if only because of a translucent honesty that
made him more and less than human. A rugged Australian, not tall but built like a hero, a face all forehead
and jaw and glowing hyperthyroid eyes. He wept only when he was angry, the biographic storytellers
said. In one minute of talk he might shift from gutter ob-scenity to some extreme of altruistic tenderness,
and from that perhaps to a philosophic comment of cold intelligence. He passed his childhood on a sheep
farm, ran away on a freighter at thirteen, was flung out of two respectable conservatories for drunkenness
and "public lewdness," then studied like a slave in London with single-minded desperation, as if he knew
the time was short. He was married twice and twice divorced. He killed a man in a silly brawl on the
New Orleans docks, and wrote his First Symphony while he was in jail for that. He died of stab wounds
from a broken bottle in a Cairo jail, and was recog-nized by the critics. It all had relevancy; relevant or
not, if the sonata was in your mind, so was the life.
You had to remember also that Andrew Carr was the last of civilization's great composers. No one
in the twenty-first century approached him—they ignored his explorations and carved cherrystones. He
belonged, to no school, unless you wanted to imagine a school of music beginning with Bach, taking in
perhaps a dozen along the way, and ending with Carr himself. His work was a summary as well as an
advance along the main-stream into the unknown; in the light of the year 2070, it was also a completion.
Brian was certain he could play the first movement of the sonata as he wished to. Technically it was
not revolutionary, and remained rather close to the an-cient sonata form. Carr had even written in a
double bar for a repeat of the entire opening statement, something that had made his cerebral
contemporaries sneer with great satisfaction; it never occurred to them that Carr was inviting the
performer to use his head.
The bright-sorrowful second movement, unfashion-ably long, with its strange pauses, unforeseen
recapitul-ations, outbursts of savage change—that was where Brian's troubles began. ("Reminiscent of